Don’t you hate it when you get banner or alert notifications when you are in the middle of watching a movie, playing a video game, or looking at photos due to the wasted pixels on the screen dedicated to the alert that is displaying? A new free jailbreak tweak dubbed NotiQuiet by iOS developer thekirbylover will let you silence notifications depending on what application you have opened. When you install it from Cydia, you’ll be greeted with the nice welcome message shown in the screenshot above.

Tapping on the Settings button in the alert, you will be shipped right to the NotiQuiet preferences pane in the Settings application. From there, you will be able to enable and disable the tweak on demand and also pick the applications that you don’t want to be bothered by notifications while you are in them. For example, choosing your Draw Something game from the list of applications will disable all banner and alert notifications while you are playing Draw Something. Notification Center notifications and application badges will continue to stack so you can view them later. The preferences pane for NotiQuiet is displayed below:

Since the tweak gives you the ability to use any application you want to without any intruding notifications whatsoever, the tweak is great for anyone who simply wants a temporary silent session or a permanent fixture for keeping distractions away. The only negative part about such a tweak is that you might not get to your notifications in time if you are enticed with a really good video game, but for many, that wouldn’t be much of a problem because video games are just the most important thing in the world.

NotiQuet requires iOS 5 and works on any device with any application – stock applications, App Store applications, and Cydia applications. The tweak is worth looking into because it adds a useful functionality to iOS. Since it’s free, you can try it out and see if it works with all the applications you would want to use it with.